LILIAN. Arnold Bennet

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СКАЧАТЬ what is euphemistically called "uxorious." He returned home of a night--often late, on account of evening classes--with ravishment. He knew that his wife and daughter would be ready to receive him, and they were. He kissed and fondled them. He praised them to their faces, asserting that their like could not be discovered among womankind, and he repeated again and again that his little Lilian was very beautiful. He ate and drank a good supper. If he loved his wife he loved also eating and drinking. Now and then he would arrive with half a bottle of champagne sticking out of his overcoat pocket. Not that he came within a thousand miles of "drinking"! He did not. He would not even keep champagne or any wine (except Australian burgundy) in the house; but he would pop in at the wine merchant's when the fancy took him.

      He seldom worried his dears with his professional troubles. Only if organization and committees were specially exasperating would he refer, and then but casually, to the darker side of existence. As for art, he never mentioned it, save to deride some example of "Continental" or "advanced" or "depraved" or "perverse" art (comprehensively described as "futurist") which had regrettably got into the pages of The Studio

      , the only magazine to which he subscribed. Nor did he ever in his prime paint or sketch for pleasure. But at the beginning of every year he would set to work to do a small thing or two for the Royal Academy, which small thing or two were often accepted by the Royal Academy, though never, one is sorry to say, sold. The Royal Academy soirée was Lilian's sole outlet into the great world. She could not, however, be as enthusiastic about it as were her father and mother; for in the privacy of her mind she held the women thereat to be a most dowdy and frumpy lot.

      The girl loved her father and mother; she also pitied her mother and hated her father. She pitied her mother for being an utterly acquiescent slave with no will of her own, and hated her father because he had not her ambition to rise above the state of the frumpy middle middle-class--and for other reasons. The man had realized his own ambitions, and was a merry soul sunk in contentment. The world held nothing that he wanted and did not possess. He looked up to the upper classes without envy or jealousy, and read about them with ingenuous joy. He had no instinct for any sort of elegance.

      Lilian was intensely ambitious, yearning after elegance. She saw illustrated advertisements of furniture in The Studio

      and of attire in the daily papers, and compared them with the smug ugliness of the domestic interior and her plain frocks, and was passionately sad. She read about the emancipation of girls and about the "new girl," and compared this winged creature with herself. Writers in newspapers seemed to assume that all girls were new girls, and Lilian knew the awful falsity of the assumption. She rarely left Putney, unless it was to go by motor-bus to Kew Gardens on a Saturday afternoon with papa and mamma. She did not reach the West End once in a thousand years, and when she did she came back tragic. She would have contrived to reach the West End oftener, but, though full of leisure, she had no money for bus fares. Mr. Share never gave her money except for a specific purpose; and she could not complain, for her mother, an ageing woman, never had a penny that she must not account for--not a penny. Never!

      Mr. Share could not conceive what either of them could want with loose money. He was not averse, he admitted, from change and progress. With great breadth of mind he admitted that change and progress were inevitable. But his attitude towards these phenomena resembled that of the young St. Augustine towards another matter, who cried: "Give me chastity, O Lord, but not yet!" In Mr. Share's view his wife and daughter had no business in the world; and indeed his finest pride was to maintain them in complete ignorance of the world. Even during the war he dissuaded Lilian from any war-work, holding that she could most meetly help the Empire to triumph by helping to solace her father in the terrific troubles of keeping a large art school alive under D.O.R.A. and the Conscription Act.

      Later, Mrs. Share was struck down by cancer on the liver and died after six months' illness, which cost Mr. Share a considerable amount of money--lavishly squandered, cheerfully paid. Mr. Share was heart-broken; he really grew quite old in a fortnight; and his mute appeal to Lilian for moral succour and the balm of filial tenderness was irresistible. Lilian had lost a mother, but the main fact in the situation was that Mr. Share had lost a peerless wife. Lilian became housekeeper and the two settled down together. Mr. Share adored his daughter more than ever, and more visibly. Her freedom, always excessively limited, was now retrenched. She was transfixed eternally as the old man's prop. Her twenty-first birthday passed, and not a word as to her future, as to a marriage for her, or as to her individuality, desires, hopes! She was papa's cherished darling.

      Then Mr. Share caught pneumonia, through devotion to duty, and died in a few days; and at last Lilian felt on her lovely cheek the winds of the world; at last she was free. Of high paternal finance she had never in her life heard one word. In the week following the funeral she learnt that she would be mistress of the furniture and a little over one hundred pounds net. Mr. Share had illustrated the ancient maxim that it is easier to make money than to keep it. He had held shipping shares too long and had sold a fully paid endowment insurance policy in the vain endeavour to replace by adventurous investment that which the sea had swallowed up. And Lilian was helpless. She could do absolutely nothing that was worth money. She could not begin to earn a livelihood. As for relatives, there was only her father's brother, a Board School teacher with a large vulgar family and an income far too small to permit of generosities. Lilian was first incredulous, then horror-struck.

      Leaving the youth of the world to pick up art as best it could without him, and fleeing to join his wife in paradise, the loving, adoring father had in effect abandoned a beautiful idolized daughter to the alternatives of starvation or prostitution. He had shackled her wrists behind her back and hobbled her feet and bequeathed her to wolves. That was what he had done, and what many and many such fathers had done, and still do, to their idolized daughters.

      Herein was the root of Lilian's awful burning resentment against the whole world, and of her fierce and terrible determination by fair means or foul to make the world pay. Her soul was a horrid furnace, and if by chance Lionel Share leaned out from the gold bar of heaven and noticed it, the sight must have turned his thoughts towards hell for a pleasant change. She was saved from disaster, from martyrdom, from ignominy, from the unnamable, by the merest fluke. The nurse who tended Lionel Share's last hours was named Grig. This nurse had cousins in the typewriting business. She had also a very kind heart, a practical mind, and a persuasive manner with cousins.

      III: Advice to the Young Beauty

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      "Come, come now, now poor girl! You surely aren't crying like this because you've been kept away from your dance to-night?"

      Lilian gave a great start, and an "Oh!" and, searching hurriedly for a handkerchief inadequate to the damming of torrents, dried up her tears at the source, but could not immediately control the sobs that continued to convulse her whole frame.

      "N-no! Mr. Grig," she whimpered feebly.

      Then she snatched at a sheet of paper and began to insert it in the machine before her, as though about to start some copying.

      "Miss Grig is rather unwell," said Felix Grig. "She insisted that I should come up, and so I came." With that he tactfully left the room, obeying the wise rule of conduct under which a man conquers a woman's weeping by running away from it.

      Lilian's face was red; it went still redder. She was tremendously ashamed of being caught blubbering, and by Mr. Grig! It would not have mattered if one of the girls had surprised her, or even Miss Grig. But Mr. Grig! Nor would it have mattered so much if circumstances had made possible any pretence, however absurd and false, that she was not in fact crying. But she had been trapped beyond any chance of a face-saving lie. She felt as though she had committed a sexual impropriety and could never СКАЧАТЬ